Voters who talked incessantly about politics but were disengaged and cynical about those who governed. The rise of populist politicians like billionaire Silvio Berlusconi.

And then we started to look a lot like them.

After inconclusive elections in March, Italy this week swore in a new government — a coalition of two centre-right parties, Lega and the Five Star Movement — which have a joint policy on immigration and asylum seekers that would resonate strongly in Australia.

Back on New Year’s Eve in 2002, I stood in the Quirinale in Rome after midnight listening to an address by the late president, Carlo Ciampi, speaking about the country’s adoption of the euro.

Ciampi emphatically said that Italy had entered the euro zone and it would thereafter always be part of one homogeneous Europe.

Less than two decades down the track, world events have changed the face of Italy with the new government full of Eurosceptics wary of Brussels’ rules, which have thrown open its borders, and listening far more closely to popular sentiment.

Italy has borne the brunt of the tide of refugees heading north from Africa and the Middle East, escaping wars or just seeking better economic prospects, and the election of the new government marks a substantial hardening of public attitudes.

Many Italians have had enough. If the left wing of the Australian Labor Party seriously wants to continue with the current push to weaken our border controls, it needs to be aware the public backlash could look something like what is happening in Italy.

Two days after the swearing-in, Lega’s leader, new Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, visited a Sicilian refugee camp to reinforce his party’s pledge to send home more than 500,000 undocumented arrivals from North Africa within five years.

“The only antidote to racism is to control, regulate and limit immigration,” Salvini said during the national election campaign. “There are millions of Italians in economic difficulty.

“Italians are not racist, but out-of-control immigration brings with it far from positive reactions. We want to prevent that.”

This week in Sicily, he hardened the rhetoric:

“The good times for illegals is over — get ready to pack your bags. Open doors in Italy for good people and a one-way ticket for those who come to Italy to create commotion and think they will be taken care of. ‘Send them home’ will be one of our top priorities.”

More than 13,500 people claiming migrant and refugee status have arrived in Italy by sea this year, boosting the 600,000 who landed since the start of 2014.

Italy has borne the brunt of the tide of refugees heading north from Africa and the Middle East, escaping wars or just seeking better economic prospects, and the election of the new government marks a substantial hardening of public attitudes.

Days before Salvini’s visit to the Pozzallo camp, 35 people drowned off the coast of Tunisia and another 67 were rescued trying to reach Italy.

And in a direct parallel to the renewed refugee debate in Australia, this was the new minister’s message:

“Every life is sacred. To save lives you have to stop the departures of these death boats, which is a lucrative business for some and a disgrace for the rest of the world.”

Sound familiar? Salvini is embarking on the same voyage that the Abbott government began after its election in 2015.

But he is already being told that Italy cannot send back to their home countries people who don’t want to go and it has no right to turn boats around at sea. Sound familiar?

Salvini bolsters his position by promising Italians to cut the $5.8 billion they spend each year on “maintaining immigrants”. And while his Lega party’s position on refugees has always been harder than the Five Star Movement’s, it is now enshrined in the 57-page government contract agreed with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

“The immigration section of the policy document calls for the deportation of Italy’s estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants ‘as a priority’, building more detention centres and a review of the European Union’s Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that migrants and refugees apply for asylum in the first EU country they reach,” Al-Jazeera reported.

So what does this shift in Italian politics mean for Australia — if anything?

The Victorian Labor Party was in some ways saved from itself over refugee policy at the end of last month in an attempt to save Bill Shorten from political embarrassment.

“In a sign of how sensitive this issue is, the Victorian Labor State conference today shut down a potentially damaging debate over the party’s policy on offshore processing,” the ABC reported on May 29.

“The motion, drafted by Labor’s left, urged the party to ‘close the offshore detention centres, transit centres and other camps on Manus and Nauru within the first 90 days’ of a Shorten government.

“But shortly before debate was due to begin, two powerful unions, the AWU and CFMEU, teamed up to defer that motion — and all others — prompting cries of ‘shame’ from the audience.”

The Guardian concluded major changes at the national conference — now due in December after the clash with the Super Saturday by-elections — were unlikely to protect Labor’s electoral chances.

But this week it became known that the Left is coming again at the NSW Labor conference due later this month, with the by-elections just four weeks later.

A document prepared by the internal Labor for refugee groups and a clutch of associated proposed motions, urge overturning some bipartisan elements of Australia’s strategies, many of them instituted by the party when in government, particularly by Kevin Rudd.

“These motions show the party’s rank and file are uncomfortable with the suite of tough policies that provide for offshore detention and processing of refugees, and boat turn-backs that are designed to deny landfall to refugees seeking asylum as a deterrent to taking the hazardous journey in the first place,” The Australian’s Troy Bramston reported.

As weary Italians try to slam the door shut on the refugee tide, Labor in Australia seems hell-bent on throwing ours open again.